Random Ways Black Death Directly Shaped Way We Live Now (14 items)

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  (#7) It Helped Create A Culture Of Anti-Semitic Intolerance In Europe

  Jewish people were blamed by many for the Black Death, especially in Germany. People were desperate for answers, so they created stories about Jewish people poisoning wells to satisfy their need for a scapegoat.

  Germans killed Jewish communities in riots called "pogroms" to eliminate the non-existent threat, nurturing a culture of anti-Semitism that ultimately lead to the Holocaust in the 20th century. A study in 2011 showed that villages where Black Death-era pogroms took place were more likely to demonstrate a violent hatred of Jews more than 600 years later.
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  (#11) It Helped Create The Middle Class In England

  Most people alive in England at the time of the Black Death were peasants. Following the Black Death, there were a whole lot fewer peasants left, meaning they could - in the words of one historian - be a lot more "choosy about where they worked" and more expensive to procure. Those remaining peasants thus accumulated the wealth of those who died and were better off than before, leading ultimately to the rise of the middle class.

  The Black Death essentially gave peasants a lot more leverage in how they related to the upper classes.
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  (#5) It Gave Us The Basis Of Our Current Property Laws

  The Black Death killed millions of people and tore families apart, which made it extremely difficult for survivors to figure out inheritances and who exactly owned pieces of property (especially when all the male heirs were wiped out). Family squabbles over such issues lead to litigation on a level unheard of prior to the plague, which lead to further litigation that set precedents in property law that still stand today.

  One historian notes that barristers from the time would function just fine in today's courts. Here's Norman Cantor on the matter: “A barrister of 1350 deep frozen and thawed out today would need only a six-month refresher course at a first-rate American law school to practice property or real estate law.”
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  (#1) It Made Modern-Day Europeans More Susceptible To Certain Diseases

  The Black Death made such a significant impact on the population of Europe that it may have literally changed the genetics of the descendants of its survivors.

  The implications are both positive and negative. Subsequent encounters with the bacteria responsible for the Black Death - Yersinia pestis - likely went a bit better thanks to the genetic shift (later outbreaks never matched the ferocity of the original). And this may also explain why modern-day Europeans are more susceptible to autoimmune diseases and pro-inflammatory diseases than populations whose ancestors didn't experience the Black Death.
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  (#3) It Prevented Vikings From Settling In North America

  The history of North America would have looked a whole lot different if the Black Death never happened. Viking settlers in Greenland all but completely died out due to the plague (and attacks by natives), so they were never able to get a foothold on mainland North America and properly settle the place.

  Norway was "enfeebled" by the plague, as well, so it couldn't get supplies to the settlements in Greenland founded centuries prior by Erik the Red. Things got so bad that Greenland had to be "rediscovered" in 1585.
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  (#4) It Gave Us The Grim Reaper

  Metalheads and Halloween lovers have the Black Death to thank for the popular image of death as a "Grim Reaper." The widespread death and disease changed the visual arts of the time to focus more on death and dying, to a macabre degree. Death became personified in the form of the scythe-toting Grim Reaper, a menacing figure that preyed upon the rich and the poor equally.

  The Black Death helped people to realize that death truly is democratic.

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